DEC Alpha and HP-UX IRAF-V2.11 platform upgrades released (December 27, 1997)

• DEC Alpha platforms running Digital Unix V4.0 or later (DUNX/IRAF).
• Hewlett-Packard platforms running HP-UX 10.20 or greater (HPUX/IRAF).
• The first patch to Sun/IRAF, upgrading the system to V2.11.1, is now available. This includes support for Solaris 2.6.

All of the above platforms are at the same IRAF patch level, V2.11.1, the most recent version of IRAF V2.11. Distributions will be found in ftp://iraf.noao.edu/iraf/v211/. Please read the README file in the distribution directory for platform specific release notes and instructions, plus technical notes on any late-breaking problems found or updates made since this announcement. Follow-up notes on these releases are posted to the adass.iraf.system newsgroup (also available as a moderated mailing list if you have given up on USENET; subscriptions are available via the IRAF web pages).

We are working with STScI to get precompiled binaries online for TABLES and STSDAS on the DEC Alpha and HP. STScI is planning a patch in the near future to update these packages to V2.11.1, fix porting bugs and probably add some new features, but we may be able to provide interim binaries for use in the meantime since we have the platforms here and we always build these packages when we do a platform upgrade. When ready, these will be found within the /contrib/tables and /contrib/stsdas subdirectories on iraf.noao.edu.

PC-IRAF (e.g. Linux) should be out next, followed by SGI IRIX/IRAF and IBM AIX/IRAF, then the other platforms (OpenVMS, VAX/VMS, Decstation etc.).

A summary of the more important revisions made since the initial 8/29 release follows. See the V2.11 system notes file included in the patch for a complete list of the changes (file $iraf/local/notes.v211).

• Image i/o was modified to add an "ambiguous image name" error trap. When an existing image is accessed as e.g. "pix", and several images exist matching this name (e.g. pix.imh, pix.fits, pix.pl), an error exit is taken. Previously one of the images would be operated upon with no indication of any error.
• Applications bug fixes: imcombine, phistogram, rfits, imcopy, imexpr, linmatch.
• Feature (imreplace): added a new parameter to allow all pixels within a certain radius of a bad pixel to also be replaced.
• The IEEE i/o package was modified to detect IEEE subnormals on input and map them to zero (this affects tasks like rfits).
• Support for "oifversion" added to IMFORT.
• Bug fix (CL): sexagesimal input conversion now done in double instead of float due to precision problems.
• Bug fix (IMIO, IMFORT): Could not update version 1 (old format) image headers.
• Added two new, experimental WCS function drives for TNX (tangent plane plus polynomials) and ZPX (zenithal radial polynomials). These are used for optically distorted astrometric applications, e.g. the NOAO Mosaic wide field camera.
• Bug fix (IMFORT): The get-next-keyword code was not returning the user fields of the header.
• Bug fix (IMIO): Filtering added to prevent any unprintable characters (such as tab or newline) from getting into FITS card images.
• IMIO: get-next-keyword now ignores non-keyword header lines such as comments, history, and blank lines.
• Bug fix (QPOE/QPIO): Fixed a typo affecting "def[xy]block" keywords in QPOE file headers (used to set the default blocking factor).
• Bug fix: Updated the login.cl file in $iraf/local for V2.11.
• FITS kernel: minor bug fixes and tuning.
• Two new files NAMES and INDEX were added in sys$, providing a means for indexing library procedures and library external names (used for software development). NAMES is useful to check for library name collisions.

Sat Dec 27 23:21:35 MST 1997